“Windows Phone handsets have outsold the iPhone in seven markets including India, analyst firm IDC has revealed, and beat out BlackBerry in 26,” Liam Tung reports for ZDNet.
“The countries where Windows Phone pipped the iOS handset in Q4 2012 were Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa and the Ukraine,” Tung reports. “The seventh market was a collection of countries, including Croatia, that IDC labels ‘rest of central and eastern Europe.’ IDC mobile analyst Kevin Restivo told the New York Times there were a few qualifiers to the Windows Phone results. There’s a ‘Nokia effect’ making Windows Phone popular where the Finnish company has traditionally been strong. Also, the grey market is sizable in some of the countries, and in Ukraine, South Africa and “rest of central and eastern Europe” fewer than 100,000 Windows Phone devices shipped in each market in the quarter.”
MacDailyNews Take: Meaning that the grey market is not measured and therefore the number of iPhones in each market likely outstrips Windows Phone sales many times over.
Tung reports, “Overall, IDC says Windows Phone and Windows Mobile devices accounted for six percent of the 227 million smartphones shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2012. For the year, Windows Phone made up 2.6 percent… IDC expects Windows Phone to account for 11.4 percent of smartphone shipments by 2016, largely off the back of declining Android market share. It forecasts Apple’s share of shipments to grow from 18.8 percent in 2012 to 19.1 percent by 2016… It predicts BlackBerry to be flat with four percent share.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote well over two years ago on October 27, 2011:
Windows Phone will be popular. Over time, it’ll eat the lunch of the increasingly fragmented, increasingly insecure, and increasingly costly Android (losing patent infringement lawsuits and dropping features/paying royalties to multiple IP owners will do that to you).
The not-iPhone world will begin to dump Android and move to Microsoft’s mobile OS offering because it will eventually cost less, work better, and come with far fewer legal issues. In the iPhone wannabe market, it’s already happening (Nokia, for example). We expect the same to happen in the iPad wannabe market, too. Google and Microsoft will long battle each other for the non-Apple markets and that’s a much better scenario for everyone than having a single ripoff artist flood the market with fragmented, insecure, beta-esque, mediocre-at-best products. Google’s attempt to be the next Microsoft is doomed.
This, of course, will also impact Google’s search business. Apple’s Siri will increasingly deliver info to users sans Google and Microsoft will, naturally, use Bing for their search. As we’ve said many times in the past: Google will rue the day they got greedy by deciding to try to work against Apple instead of with them.
The bottom line: We’d rather see a company trying unique ideas, even if – shockingly – it’s Microsoft, than the wholesale theft of Apple innovations that we’ve been seeing for over
four[six] years now. Don’t steal IP. Even worse, don’t steal IP and “claim to be innovators.” We have no problem with any companies that attempt to compete with Apple using their own unique ideas and strategies.
Related articles:
J.D. Power: Apple ranks highest in smartphone customer satisfaction for 9th consecutive time – March 21, 2013
World’s best-selling smartphone: Apple iPhone 5; iPhone 4S #2, third place Samsung Galaxy 3 brings up rear – February 20, 2013
